Tag Archives: Edinburgh

24 Sep 2014

Contemporary art at Jupiter Artland

It's been a while since my last visit to Jupiter Artland. however it's a best place to find contemporary art in Edinburgh in my opinion. I am all up for mixing a bit of 'work' with pleasure as we visited on my birthday. However, I don't view art, galleries and the like being work as I think if you're a creative type then you just can't get enough of it!

Taking part in the Speed of Light art project in August, created by NVA as part of the Edinburgh International Festival and the Olympiad Celebrations reminded me just how much creativity is flying around our city at that time of year. Also how game the public is for participating in such events. Not forgetting the commitment of artists to providing this fantastic experience for the public. (more…)

Our first mentee has a great future mapped out for him as he's had great news over the weekend that he has been successful in his application to Glasgow School of Art to study Sculpture and Environmental Art course. In just 9 months he's gone from having no portfolio to being offered an unconditional place at one of the country's most prestigious art colleges that has produced many of the nominated artists for arguably the world’s most recognised and prestigious award for contemporary art, the Turner Prize.

In June 2012 Lachlan contacted Portfolio Oomph to help him on the right track to going on to study at art college – the only problem being he hadn't studied art past the age of 15 therefore he didn't meet the minimum entry requirements for most further education colleges that feed the university and art college courses. (more…)

We all know that drawing is the essence of being an artist, at least to being able to visually communicate your ideas initially on paper through drawing. How you then create your ideas depends on the idea, your skills and materials/techniques available.

Our eBooks and eCourses emphasize this and as I am putting together the eCourse on Drawing, I thought what better time to brush up on my own life drawing skills? (more…)

Just a quick post here to let you know that our recent press release is now reaping rewards. We've a half page article in the Midlothian Advertiser, our local paper. We have others to follow up but this isn't bad for starters! (more…)

The subject of mentoring has cropped up in conversation a number of times with a number of people in the past week or so. I meet on the last Wednesday of each month with a very good friend Sam Miller to support each other with our new businesses, that of Portfolio Oomph and Sam Miller UK. Working from home on a business or as an artist alone can be quite isolating and as you have no colleagues to bounce ideas around with, you can get rather stuck in a rut from time to time. It’s been really good to get some objective support from someone I trust and value. This being exactly the function of the mentoring service including portfolio advice that Portfolio Oomph offers to students seeking to apply to art college.
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I've been waiting to write this blog post for a while as it's so exciting – for me at least! When we think about line, the first visualisation for an artist is usually a line drawing, yes? As I've been writing our eBook on 'Creating a Sensational Portfolio', one of the chapters is about the use of line to inspire our research work. In the past few months whilst researching artists work for these books, the use of line and line drawing has cropped up in many different guises and I will aim to cover some of my best discoveries here. There will be more images to find on our Pinterest page, another thing I've been whittling my time away on and I love it!

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